Scotland and the Sea. Nick Robins
was provided for twelve passengers in twin-berth cabins on the shelter deck and there were two single-berth cabins on the boat deck. The cabins were sold as staterooms and were comparable with the staterooms on offer aboard any of the crack transatlantic liners of the day. The dining saloon was panelled in mahogany and there was the obligatory stone fireplace complete, in winter, with an open fire. Above the saloon, and linked by an elegant staircase, was the oak-panelled smoke room which was adorned with leather armchairs in the style of a contemporary gentleman’s club.
In 1933 the company bought M Isaacs & Sons of London and in so doing entered the Mediterranean trade. It rebranded itself as Currie Line in World War II when all its regular services were again suspended as it had suffered the ignominy of having correspondence opened by the authorities and censored! Twelve of its fleet of twenty-seven ships were lost in the Second World War, while one replacement was acquired in 1942, although this ship was lost to a torpedo a few months later. Gothland suffered bomb damage lying alongside at London in September 1940. Six months later Courland, under the command of Captain R Smith, was sunk by torpedo while in convoy approximately four hundred miles off Gibraltar. Three of the crew of thirty were lost; all the survivors were rescued by Currie’s Brandenburg which was also in the convoy. Sadly, all but one man, a passenger, were lost the following day when Brandenburg was sunk under similar circumstances – a grim couple of days for the Currie Line.
Gothland was requisitioned in November 1941 for conversion at Plymouth into a Convoy Rescue Ship. The vessels selected for this role were all fast, low freeboard coastal ships with existing passenger accommodation. They attended to casualties in convoy so that the convoy escorts could concentrate on the attacker. This required good seamanship and adept use of the ship’s boats. There was also a trawl boom and net that could sweep swimmers out of the water when the sea was too rough to launch a boat. Gothland was mainly employed on North Atlantic convoys to St John’s, Newfoundland, and Halifax, Nova Scotia, but did attend occasional convoys down to Gibraltar. Between commissioning in February 1942 and the end of World War II Convoy Rescue Ship Gothland undertook twenty voyages and saved 149 persons from seven sinkings and one aircraft ditching.
Gothland resumed civilian duties post-war, this time on the Leith to Copenhagen route, but in the late 1950s her owners were beginning to concentrate on the bulk cargo trade and the North Sea services were run down; Gothland was sold for further service in 1958 and was scrapped three years later.
The first Currie Line motor ship was Scotland which ran from London to the Mediterranean from 1946 until she was sold in 1967. All passenger carrying ceased in 1958 but the cargo services persisted in partnership with foreign partners such that the Liverpool to Hamburg and Grangemouth to Finland services were entirely foreign flagged by 1964. Interestingly, the company ventured into the deep-sea tramp market in 1959, seeing an opportunity for the carriage of vegetable oils. Three ships were commissioned, the oil carrier Roland, working to West Africa, the bulk carrier Gothland and the conventional break bulk cargo ship Highland, the latter chartered for much of her tenure with Leith registry to the Shaw Savill and Alfred Holt joint cargo service to Australia. She was sold to the Anchor line and renamed Elysia in 1968 when Walter Runciman & Company, then owners of Anchor (see chapter 12), bought the entire Currie Line holding and its goodwill. The Currie Line ships were replaced by chartered tonnage in the 1970s when the focus slowly changed to storage and road haulage.
Typical of the smaller traders in the Leith, Hull & Hamburgh Steam Packet Company fleet in the twentieth century was Haarlem (1917), one of a group of four steamers purchased from Dutch owners in 1922, seen at a frosty Danish port unloading a cargo of coke.
The first motor ship in the Currie Line was Scotland (1946) which, with sister ship England, maintained the Mediterranean sailings.
The Emigrant – Fuel for Trade and Empire
In the evidence on the convicts in New South Wales a number of the colonists commented that Scottish emigrants were much preferred as settlers to any other nationality. The Scottish labourers were preferred because they were ‘more skilful workmen, they are better agricultural servants, also better shepherds …’ and wherever skilled labour was needed employers preferred the Scottish emigrants. To help encourage Scottish emigration to New South Wales, Crown lands were being sold to pay for assisted passages and … three ships having recently sailed from the United Kingdom, with several more being expected from the Western Highlands. He said that in the main the Scots were found to be keen to emigrate as they hoped one day to establish themselves as landowners. Because of this willingness on the part of the Scots the emigration officers were able to select those they wanted and usually picked married couples as near 30 years old as possible.
From Transportation. Report from the Select Committee.
Minutes of evidence, 1837, vol XIX (Sessional no. 518)
EMIGRATION IN THE EARLY nineteenth century was the result of both force and persuasion. Until the 1850s emigrants from the Highlands were forced to leave the land because of evictions whereas in the Lowlands the decision to emigrate was driven largely by the desire to improve living standards. Whatever the reason, Scotland lost between 10 per cent and 47 per cent of the natural population increase every decade. Those leaving Scotland during the period 1921–30 exceeded the entire natural increase despite the United States placing quotas on emigrant numbers in 1922. The scale of the emigration was exceeded only by Ireland and Norway.
The introduction of the US quota system was a severe blow to many passenger shipping companies on the Atlantic. The Anchor Line was forced to close its Mediterranean transatlantic passenger route which was heavily dependent on emigrant traffic from Italy (see chapter 12). Two new ships, Caledonia and Transylvania, had to be redesigned as a consequence, with greatly reduced steerage accommodation. It also meant that Anchor Line was overstocked with passenger liners leading to its inevitable collapse in the 1930s.
Transylvania (1925), with one smoking funnel and dummies to fore and aft, was too late for the Anchor Line Mediterranean to New York emigrant service and was reconfigured to work from the UK.
Emigrant traffic, both to the United States and Canada, as well as to South Africa and the Antipodes, was the mainstay of many shipping companies – Henderson’s Albion Line, for example, was renowned for the carriage of migrants to New Zealand under the sponsorship of the Free Church of Scotland and enjoyed a near monopoly on the transit of passengers from the Clyde to Otago (see chapter 4). Only when the New Zealand government sponsored its own line of steamships did the Albion Line clippers get into financial difficulties, sail having become little match for steam by the 1890s.
The importance of the emigrant to the mother country cannot be overstated, the more so in the case of the skilled emigrants from Lowland Scotland who retained their links with Scottish business. The Scottish emigrant was a vital catalyst to the pre-eminence of Scotland as a maritime nation for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is important to appreciate how the expatriate Scottish communities fuelled Empire and trade and underpinned Scottish maritime endeavour. The global impact of these emigrants is apparent to this day. The largest Highland gathering in the world is now held in Singapore – caber tossing, the lot – and in many Nova Scotian communities the older folk recount how Gaelic was their first language and the language used in school. Today there are few towns and cities in the world which do not have some kind of Caledonian Society or Club, even if only to celebrate Robbie Burns once a year in the local hostelry.
The Scottish emigrant